one of them was led by an unassuming man like Darwin Smith
. Those who
worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following
words: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered,
self-effacing, understated.
The lesson, says Collins, is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to
transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but
the institutions they run.
So what do introverted leaders do differently from—and sometimes
better than—extroverts?
One answer comes from the work of Wharton management professor
Adam Grant, who has spent considerable time consulting with Fortune
500 executives and military leaders—from Google to the U.S. Army and
Navy.
When we first spoke, Grant was teaching at the Ross School of
Business at the University of Michigan, where he’d become convinced
that the existing research, which
showed a correlation between
extroversion and leadership, didn’t tell the whole story.
Grant told me about a wing commander in the U.S. Air Force—one
rank below general, in command of thousands of people, charged with
protecting a high-security missile base—who was one of the most
classically introverted people, as well as one of the finest leaders, Grant
had ever met. This man lost focus when he interacted too much with
people, so he carved out time for thinking and recharging. He spoke
quietly, without much variation in his vocal inflections or facial
expressions. He was more interested
in listening and gathering
information than in asserting his opinion or dominating a conversation.
He was also widely admired; when he spoke, everyone listened. This
was not necessarily remarkable—if you’re at the top of the military
hierarchy, people are supposed to listen to you. But in the case of this
commander, says Grant, people respected not just his formal authority,
but also the way he led: by supporting his employees’ efforts to take the
initiative. He gave subordinates input into key decisions, implementing
the ideas that made sense, while making it clear that he had the final
authority. He wasn’t concerned with getting credit or even with being in
charge; he simply assigned work to those who could perform it best. This
meant delegating some of his most interesting, meaningful, and
important tasks—work that other leaders would have kept for
themselves.
Why did the research not reflect the talents
of people like the wing
commander? Grant thought he knew what the problem was. First, when
he looked closely at the existing studies on personality and leadership,
he found that the correlation between extroversion and leadership was
modest. Second, these studies were often based on people’s perceptions
of who made a good leader, as opposed to actual results. And personal
opinions are often a simple reflection of cultural bias.
But most intriguing to Grant was that the existing research didn’t
differentiate among the various kinds of situations a leader might face. It
might be that certain organizations or contexts were better suited to
introverted leadership styles, he thought, and others to extroverted
approaches, but the studies didn’t make such distinctions.
Grant had a theory about which kinds of circumstances would call for
introverted leadership. His hypothesis
was that extroverted leaders
enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that
introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees. To test
his idea, he and two colleagues, professors Francesca Gino of Harvard
Business School and David Hofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business School
at the University of North Carolina, carried out a pair of studies of their
own.
In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of
the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that
the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent
higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the
employees were passive types
who tended to do their job
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